"Anyhow, to make a long story short, the limited version outsold the unlimited one. Five to one. Colin calculates that the experiment cost him $17,000 in sales versus having 100% of the installations be limited. Crickey."

The result of the real world test was that a crippled version was much more successful in driving sales than a non-crippled version.

He took a utility which had just written and had it secretly flip a coin on first installation: it would either function in unrestricted mode without being registered (and have two nag screens for donations) or it would be feature-limited (and have two nag screens offering the upgrade).

If he'd have given the user a reminder, say once a week for the first two weeks, I bet he would have gotten more.

I was not stating that the results seemed correct to me - merely that they were stated much more precisely than "it depends".
That depends on how you view his "experiment". If you view it as a test for HIS SOFTWARE, his results were pretty clear. But as he stated himself, THIS DOES NOT APPLY TO ALL SOFTWARE, as not all software lends itself to being crippled. Therefor, IT DEPENDS on what kind of software you are trying to peddle. Read TFA again.

"That depends on how you view his "experiment". If you view it as a test for HIS SOFTWARE, his results were pretty clear. But as he stated himself, THIS DOES NOT APPLY TO ALL SOFTWARE, as not all software lends itself to being crippled. Therefor, IT DEPENDS on what kind of software you are trying to peddle. Read TFA again."

You didn't make that point very well. Don't tell me to read the article when you're unable to communicate your thoughts.

Sure, but everyone says "I'd rather donate money to a worthy Open Source project than pay for crippleware," but how many of those people actually do? I'm guessing that a very small fraction of the people that claim to be willing to monetarily support Open Source software actually do so. Most people will download and use the software, and maybe post something to the effect of "I'd have no problem paying for this." But along with that statement is the implied "...but I don't have to, so I won't."

I do...a couple hundred bucks so far this year. Mostly stuff on SourceForge and some $$ to Ubuntu (Canonical.) And I always point out to people where/how to donate when I put quality stuff on their machines. No, I dont' track who donates...NOMB.

Actually in the article, they say that for a specific product the average donation was 0.38 cent.Anyway, who pays ? I pay. I'm a developer so I gladly pay because I know what's behind the development of a software. But I guess I'm the exception rather than the norm. ( yes, I have license for everything on my computer. If I cannot pay (or I don't think the price is right, like DVD) I don't use it. )

But I look in my family and friends that are not in contact with development world.There are 2 categories:

I wanted a reminder program for Windows some years back and checked out the shareware programs that were available. One program (xReminder, v1 at the time) rose well above the pack (by being small in size, highly configurable, and innovative in design) and I went for it. The limit was you could only have up to 5 reminders in the shareware version. I registered it and now have 177 reminders. The author has updated it about once every year or so, there have never been bug fixes, and each major update has

Nobody cares about your baseless opinions unless you have some motivation we can relate too. It is like describing your poop, nobody cares about how big it is or what color since it doesn't help us to know random facts about your internal state. It doesn't really help us unless we are doing some sort of poll. We aren't doing a poll."I think soup is good." "I like trees." "I won't buy a tire that doesn't have white letters on the side." "I don't buy shareware that is crippled."

I don't find the result surprising at all. In the real world, there are more people who will pay up if it's directly in their interests than will pay up simply out of respect/gratitude/charity/whatever, not least because one set is likely to be almost entirely contained within the other.

Yeah, I can't help but think that anyone who thought the unrestricted version would make more is rather naive. To me, it's more of a decision of conscious for the developer, as to where you want to be on the greed/altruism scale.

If Bingo-Card Creator is aimed at the educational market, he could probably make more money by giving it away. Once the fair-market price has been established, any copies that he distributes to legitimate educational institutions provide him with a tax write-off. Of course, if you don't have any other income, this won't do you any good. However, most (not all) shareware developers do it as a side business.There are also many other "customers" that fall into the same category as educational institutions.

While I definitely believe in for-pay software, this analysis misses out on the really critical sharing effect. That is: Presumably every person who successfully adopts a piece of software increases the chances of more people using it. Especially now (as opposed to 94/95) that effect is huge - people like this guy talk on their blogs about software they love. This is SOMETIMES pay software... but when people get hit with the disabling features, SOME of them pay up and SOME of them simply stop using it.I

A teacher that works 14 hours a day and makes $31,000/year, and the school system refuses to buy stuff like this, instead focusing on extra secretaries at the main office so the administrative people, who don't do much anyway, can take more time off.

The result of this study is rather unsurprising to me. What is suprising is that this fairly trivial piece of software, created entirely for the purposes of this experiment, earned its author $34,075 in one year. Wow. And there was probably a good deal more money to be made if it always ran in restricted functionality mode.

Now, granted, he has an established company, so he probably has some good connections with download sites and magazines to get his program included, but that's a tidy sum for "a couple of days" of work.

It was made (and I assume sold in) 94-95. Probably for Win 3.1The real question is, how valid is this data now? Its probably still very valid but the types of people using computers have grown by large numbers sence then. Of course the % of people who would pay for such a simple program has probably reduced as well.

Note that the target audience of this particular help-file printing software might involve people who have no printed documentaiton because they are using an unpaid for copy of some software? So, that whole test may just tell you what unethical (as far as paying for licensed software) people do?

(It was my blog, incidentally. I don't know why the submitter had interest in a days old blog about a years old experiment, but eh, I'm happy you found it interesting.)

Slashdotters will almost certainly find the original article at http://hackvan.com/pub/stig/articles/why-do-people -register-shareware.html [hackvan.com] as or more interesting as my blog summary of it, which strips out all the detail in favor of talking about another example (Movable Type) and two current programs (one mine, one somebody else's) and their different crippling strategies (features vs. time).

(I would have modded the parent up but I get 2 points for free and modding only gives the AC 1. Sorry, AC.)

Did anyone else find it more than slightly ironic, given the discussion about Moveable Type and its move from donationware to crippleware, what the guy's blog is run with?That's right, it's... WordPress.

You know, the FOSS/GPL competitor to Moveable Type, which gained popularity in no small part because of the exodus of users from Moveable Type circa version 3.0, when they tried to cripple the free personal version. (I won't say that WP was created in response to that, because it wasn't and has existed as f

...because you get full use of the application. This is important if you are doing serious evaluation. And let's be realistic--if you are seriously evaluating a program, you should be able to effectively do so within the time limits as long as the time limits are reasonable. And if you really need to run over the time limit, Try contacting the company and ask them to extend it. Many (but not all) companies are more than willing to work with you if you are serious about evaluating their program.

I think we can all admit that we have, at one time or another, used a less-than-legal copy of software. Many times, it's a one-shot "need", but in many cases, it's to evaluate a program that's otherwise crippled. And for me, there are many, MANY times when the ability to have unrestricted use led to purchases.

If you want to actually make money, the best is probably a combination. When first downloaded you get full functionality, for a time. This gets you hooked on all the features. Then the trial period runs out and the features are limited. You know the features are there, and you can still use the program, but to reactivate all the features you need to pay.

Simply shutting down the program at the end of the trial period, for me at least, means I will stop running the program and thinking about it. I'll probably check to see if there is another way to do what I need, without using your program. If you want me to pay, you need to keep me using it, but disable enough that I think paying is worth it.

The article discusses this and his conclusion is that there are times to cripple it by features and times to cripple it by a time limit. I think if you have a product that people need for a specific task in the short term but not necessarily in the long run, then it makes more sense to feature cripple it. For example, consider data recovery programs. Almost all of them feature cripple the software so you can see which documents you may be able to recover but you can't actually recover the document until

I prefer time limits that actually time how long you use the program, rather than how long it's been since you first ran it.

If I install something with a 30 day trial, have a quick fiddle, and then get distracted by Real Life[tm], those 30 days could have run out by the time I find the program in/Applications and remember that I hadn't finished trying it out. Now what?

A program that lets you run it on 10 separate occasions would have been much more useful, because I'd still have 9 shots left at evaluating it. Even better would be changing the 30 day limit to a 10 day limit, but only counting days that you run the program - that way, if you accidentally hit Quit and immediately restart, you don't get dinged for it.

I agree to an extent, but then there is also the thorny issue of "one time use" utility type of products. For example, when I ripped my CD's to mp3's, I used a 30 day trial shareware program. I ripped all 200 or so over the course of a week or two.

Technically, I was completely in my rights to use the software as I did.

In reality, I was violating the spirit of the purpose of the shareware feature of the program.

So then, the question is tis: If you had additional CD's to rip now that you are passed the tria

Time limits are great for software that the user will use over and over. But they're no good for software the user only needs to use a couple of times. For instance, I once made FontCollector, a shareware PalmOS utility to convert fonts (now it's GPL). I decided that a time limit would mean that a user could simply convert all the fonts he wanted in one day, and then discard the utility. So instead I added an extra pixel dot under every 's' glyph in the trial version--good enough to see exactly how the

I don't find the results very surprising. While he's trying to prove to Slashdotters the reasons for his methods he only responds with the financial ones. The reason developers on/. are generally against crippling software is because it just feels wrong to do it. If we can write software to perform a task then want to do it and give it to those who want it. The method of profit becomes secondary to the functionality of the software. Therefore we feel slightly better offering a trial period because the user gets to really use the software in all its glory. But we'd prefer to pass out our software fully functional and hope some who like it offer us something back.

I think figuring out the way to profit is a difficult problem. Not because it's hard to pick between trial periods and crippling. But because we want to feel good about the software we write and at the same time make a living from it.

I find that crippleware is the more annoying than nag-ware. With nagware and timebombware, at least someone can still test it in a real world setting, whereas crippleware no one can. Whenever I come across crippleware, I don't care how useful they claim it will be, If I can't check to see if it will fit my needs, I uninstall it and look for something similar. If I can't find anything similar, I decide I don't really need it so badly. If the features are not restricted in any way, I will check it and If

Forte Agent Newsreader, argueably the best USENET reader of all time for WinTel, has always released exceptional "crippleware".Free Agent [forteinc.com] is the free version, a good basic USENET and email client. Agent is the advanced version with all the buttons and whistles. I used Free Agent for 1 year, paid for Agent, and years later paid for an upgrade to version 2.0, all while using it on Windows 3.1, 95, 98, 2k, XP, fully supported.

Their "crippled" version just has much less features (uuencode/decode/mime on the f

Although I agree there is some crippleware that is still usable to try, most of the crippleware is crippled in the wrong way. For example, someone downloads some application that they need, and then try to use over half of the features just to get "Can't use this feature because this is shareware, To use this feature, you must register it" even after they claim that shareware is "try before you buy". How can anyone try such crap if the features that someone needs to try is crippled? I have registered sever

Once you give it away, why would anyone buy it?I have seen people with time-limited software that they know they have to set the date back 5 years in order to use. They do this without any qualms whatsoever.

If you have some kind of unlock code, there is a registry somewhere on the Internet for that code. Again, if it is available, why wouldn't everyone just use that instead of paying?

Paying is decreasing a limited resource. Stealing (and yes, it is stealing) does not consume any resources and just increa

I work in the public sector, and I have a sizable budget for IT expenses. I can justify expenditure on just about anything simply by saying I need it. However, the purchasing department wouldn't let me give money to a project if I can get the same software free of charge. We're very carefully audited to make sure our software is licensed, but if the license permits usage at no cost then there is no way we can justify giving a donation. We would be in big trouble if we were found to be `wasting' taxpayers' money in this way.

Even in the private sector, a corporation has a legal responsibility to its shareholders to reduce costs, and runs the risk of being sued by them if it donates money unnecessarily.

Neither public nor private organizations are allowed to be charitable with their patrons' money.

Offer the software for free for personal use, but require a fee for non-personal use.

That is incompatible with the GPL, and much of the really good Free (as in speech or beer) softare is GPL. If you are building on a GPL program, or using many GPL libraries, you legally can not do that as an author because you are taking away the user's rights.

This is a good point.I'm not really sure what the best solution is, aside from offering the software under some sort of a less-than-Free license that requires a fee for commercial or government use. Obviously, that's GPL-incompatible.

Maybe the solution is to offer support contracts that sort of correspond to various levels of the software, or sell "retail box" editions which on paper seem superior to whatever you're giving away for free. This could be as easy as making the free version use a different name

If I understand things correctly, the author of TFA is the creator of bingo-card making software for teachers to use in classroom activities. The shareware version is restricted to only create 15 cards, on the assumption that this will not be enough cards for every student, so the teacher (who also assumes that the teacher will probably use this for one lesson and then never again), wants to charge the teacher (who has over 15 students, so obviously not a teacher in a private or well-funduded suburban scho

(Hiya, I'm the author of TFA and Bingo Card Creator). Here's the closest OSS program to my software: http://sourceforge.net/projects/bingo-cards/ [sourceforge.net] . Feel free to use it if it fits your needs better. (I'll be perfectly honest: I think I do a much better job. For example, I have features such as "actually runs on a Windows PC instead of crashing on install" and "prints without leaving the program". If I didn't think I could do a better job than what was available for free, I wouldn't have invested my time and money into the project.) If not, you can do things the traditional way by paying your educational publisher of choice $15 a bingo card set. If you plan on doing this activity twice, ever, I really do save you money.

BINGO is, like, trivial to implement. Once you know your dev environment, it is literally an afternoon or two of programming.It does make a good topic for a homework problem in an algorithms class, I suppose, or a good sample for showing the capabilities of a dev environment.

But most of the work is in understanding your dev environment, whether the old Claris/AppleWorks spreadsheet with a bunch of referenced cells and a neat range for random-sorting the referenced cells, or an old basic interpreter with its

The problem is that you make a really, really obnoxious assumption: that everyone can, should or want to write programs for a computer.

We've spent the last 50-odd years proving that some people do and most do not. They just want to "use" a computer as an appliance. They do not want to be creative. They do not want to learn new things. They want to accomplish a task and be done with it.

might be that you assume an awful lot about the assumptions that others have.Number one, in any particular school district, there is at least one hobbiest programer with the skills to slap together a word bingo card printing program in a reasonable small number of his spare time hours. Probably there is at least one such programer at any particular school. Okay, I'm restricting the scope of this conjecture to US schools, but I am assuming existing technologies. (I happen to have a couple such programs I hav

If you're only going to use bingo as a learning aid for one lesson, just make the cards by hand, or use cut-n-paste in Excel. By paying the $25 for this guy's software, you get the ability to easily make bingo cards for as many lessons as you want, whenever you want, for the rest of your life. Does that sound like a better deal?

The guy writing bingo software is out there to make money. You can't blame him for that. If you are selling any kind of software, it would probably be crazy to target customers that can't afford to pay $25.

Teachers don't exactly have expense accounts, and don't get paid well-enough to be expected to pay out of pocket...

Teachers don't make bad money where I live. In fact, I'd say their wages are in the same ballpark as general IT staff at my university and the IT staff works year round. $25 is not

I don't recall class sizes of 15 at my own well funded suburban school district, but that's neither here nor now. I realize teachers definately have a severe budget constraint, which is probably why giving free stuff [wordpress.com] pulls in a lot of clicks from teachers. Certainly, I'd expect the best public school teachers to be masters of getting something for nothing. But I think the author's banking on the idea that if a teacher finds the budget for it, they'll eventually use it as more than just a one-off activity. C

The point being made in TFA is all very well and good, for a developer who writes his own programs from scratch, or derives from public domain resources which he then closes into shareware. However, the proposal has a very limited future.

Not too far down the line, it will become completely impossible for any fully independent developer to compete against the collosal pyramid of software resources being constructed by the FOSS movement. And that includes the Redmonds and IBMs of this world, not a chance. A thousand fully paid developers beavering away without the benefit of standing on the shoulders of a thousand times that many unpaid giants will get absolutely nowhere, comparatively speaking.

This is just a simple matter of geometric growth of FOSS capability, and the trend is absolutely unstoppable (except possibly by patents, hence the worry there). To stay on the leading edge, your application will have to ride that collosal resource, because to not do so will mean spending an extreme amount of time and money reinventing the wheel and probably failing anyway. And that precludes shareware, because of licensing.

While some people don't like the intentionally viral nature of the GPL, it is instrumental in making sure that this stunningly huge resource continues to grow and to be ever more beneficial to the community that uses it. While that doesn't make its use compulsary, and non-dependent developers like in TFA will probably always exist for small projects, the general trend is clear: if you want to write something beyond your ability for total reinvention, you won't be able to make it shareware.

Except one thing: Usability. I've encountered few pieces of FOSS software that I would consider truly usable. Firefox is a delightful exception, as well as Adium (IM client for OSX), but for the most part it's just a dreadery of buttons and panels that only a coder could grok.

That's all fine and dandy for the "background" type of FOSS, things like Apache, MySQL, PHP and whatnot, where your target audience are of the technical inclination.

Have you used a modern GNOME or KDE desktop? They're very usable.At least with GNOME, many new computer users I've tried find it easier than Windows. Naturally people who are used to Windows have some switching difficulties though (button order, menu names etc.). There are always improvements that could be made, but they are very nice to use (at least the core apps). Also, I am a programmer and use GNOME, and I've never had issues with not being able to do something. If there's no GUI for some advanced task

Yet for all this supposed power of the FOSS movement, if the author of this bingo card creator is to be believed, there isn't even a really good open source bingo card creator.We're mighty and powerful, and you can't compete with us....oh, bingo card creator? no we don't have a good one of those.

Another downfall of FOSS is thier inability to conduct expensive usability research studies. A thousand times that many unpaid giants will get absolutely nowhere towards making usable software without standing on th

Exactly my point. Despite your claims that"it will become completely impossible for any fully independent developer to compete against the collosal pyramid of software resources being constructed by the FOSS movement"

there are literally thousands of niche areas that are completely ignored by FOSS, and many more that are not ignored but not well done either. I never said they COULDN'T create a good bingo program. Just that they HAVEN'T. And I bet new niches pop up just as fast as the FOSS movement could fill

No doubt there will be niches, but I doubt most of them can be filled by shareware.

As I see it...

Pure proprietary software will be pushed into "hard and specialized" niches, mostly math intensive stuff that only so many people can do well, FOSS in this domain is and will continue to be mostly unpolished university research. As the problems get better understood FOSS will move in and big players on to other grounds. This could go on for a long time.

it will become completely impossible for any fully independent developer to compete against the collosal pyramid of software resources being constructed by the FOSS movement.

Most of the open source libraries I use are bsd licensed or lgpl or something comparable. On the other hand, I use plenty of gpl applications. I suspect this is the natural order of things. If you gpl an application, you don't cripple/restrict people who want to use the application. If you gpl a library, you do, and it can be ev

This is wishfull thinking. your thousands and thousands of developers are answerable to nobody, with little incentive to band together and get organised.

They don't need to be organized. All they need to do is to add to the volume of FOSS resources, and they are doing that admirably and in collosal amounts. The size of the FOSS mountain is just mind-boggling already, and always increasing.

However, there is another way of looking at this which perhaps will suit you better:

"Not too far down the line, it will become completely impossible for any fully independent developer to compete against the collosal pyramid of software resources being constructed by the FOSS movement."There are thousands of niche apps created by small vendors that have no open source equivalent, and never will. Give your head a shake, and stop dreaming.

Realise that there will always be a place - a very large place - for proprietary, paid-for software. Usability, strange niches (like bingo cards), custom p

The "days of yore" for shareware could have been the early 90's. It would be interesting to see if the same result is obtained now - I think the difference might be less now, as people have become more used to the idea of open source and supporting it regardless of it being free.

You can read here, linked from TFA [hackvan.com] that it was from April '94 through February '95. I rather doubt that the numbers would be much more different now -- take a look at the Movable Type example cited later in the article, which covers totally voluntary donationware in the 2000s.

How do most people buy and use software?1) Fully functional software that is pre-installed on their computer2) Use a light, but fully functional version, that is pre-installed on their computer3) Buy the full version of software needed at a store. Or, buy the pro version of 2), that has more features.4) Do internet research and find a list of shareware and freeware and try to find the best of the bunch for the lowest cost5) Get a list of FOSS/freeware from a knowlegable guru to install on their computer.

Once someone gets software on their computer, they are usually very hesitant to get rid of it, especially if they like how it works. For example, I currently use CamFrog, which is slightly crippled. It only allows you view one camera at a time in a small window. Otherwise, it is fully functional. Now, as I become more addicted to using the software, I want to watch more than one webcam at a time, and in bigger windows. The marginal utility for the $50 pro version is huge!

If the software is so crippled that I can't try it out, or have a chance to become reliant upon it, paying $ to use it might not be worth it.

On the other hand, if its not crippled at all, and its fully functional, I have no incentive to give money at all, except altruisticly.

"There is a belief in the online world that people will be more willing to compensate an author for a downloaded program that has full functionality, versus paying to unlock features in a shareware version. Someone actually put this idea to a test with surprising results."

I'm not certain that iD would agree with this. Doom was released as shareware without all the levels. When they did try a shareware release with everything. People didn't purchase.[1}

I have a new shareware program I plan to release soon and I'm trying to decide if I should stay with shareware or go with donationware. TFA is a very important plot point for me. My primary motivation for considering donationware is the hassle of dealing with registration codes. I've done everything I can think of to make the code easier to enter. It just seems that people are unable to perform a simple copy and paste.

So, this article tells me that donationware really isn't a good idea. It also says that i

Some of the best registration code that I've seen tells you to copy the entire e-mail into the clipboard and then the program pulls what it needs. Unfortunately, I don't recall which program that was... probably UltraEdit, SecureCRT, FTP Voyager or maybe something else.

So it should be of no surprise that most people who download from p2p will not buy the content they pirate, despite claims to the contrary. Actual consumer data shows this "try before you buy" theory is false, but that doesn't stop people from claiming it's true. It is nice to see some hard data from the software world that backs this up.